-The Telegraph Hyderabad: As rights groups accused the anti-Maoist militia Salwa Judum of atrocities on Chhattisgarh's villagers, its founder Mahendra Karma kept insisting his only aim was to "liberate" the tribals from the rebels' tyranny and propaganda. The future of the government-backed vigilante group, which still survives unofficially despite a Supreme Court order to disband it, now looks bleak after the Maoists killed Congress tribal leader Karma yesterday. The Salwa Judum (whose name...

-The Hindu   Neha Khator narrates the story of an NGO that transformed a backward village into a bustling city, with funds, of course, but also by fostering a sense of duty in its residents. Vimla Kanwar, a 70-year-old widow, had a problem. After her husband, a handloom yarn spinner, died of cancer, the officials at the Khadi Gram Udyog took away his charkha. Concerned about finding a means of survival at her...

-The Telegraph Bengal - Defrauded Many households in Calcutta have a domestic help or a driver who has lost money by investing in Saradha schemes - a common thread that has spun a perception that the poor are the sole victims of the sham company. But Sudipta Sen's promise of high returns had blurred the divide between the haves and the have-nots as well as the educated and the uneducated. Travels across the semi-urban...

-The Hindu The south leads in the number of medical and nursing seats, with for-profit private colleges dominating the scene. It will take major capacity expansion in the government sector to meet WHO norms on access to health professionals. India has achieved major organisational and technological successes but the health system's performance is abysmal. This cannot be attributed to poverty. It is poor health that places India 134th in the Human Development...

-The Hindu Mumbai: Unsafe abortions are killing a woman every two hours in this country, according to estimates and calculations correlating data on maternal mortality ratio (MMR) and Sample Registration System (SRS) data by Ipas, India, an international NGO working on increasing access to safe abortion services. The last nationwide MMR data giving details of causes of maternal deaths was in SRS 2001-03, said advisor, policy for Ipas India, Medha Gandhi. While...